Roberto Navigli is Professor of Natural Language Processing at the Sapienza University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where he leads the Sapienza NLP research group (https://nlp.uniroma1.it). He is a Fellow of ACL, AAAI, ELLIS, and EurAI, and he served as General Chair of ACL 2025, the leading conference in Natural Language Processing (NLP). He has published over 250 papers in the most important conferences and journals in the field of NLP and Artificial Intelligence.
His research focuses on artificial intelligence techniques that enable the understanding and computational representation of semantics, with particular attention to Word Sense Disambiguation, Entity Linking, Semantic Role Labeling, and semantic parsing. In these areas, he has received two ERC grants (Starting and Consolidator), selected among the 15 projects through which the ERC has transformed science, as well as numerous awards from leading international journals and conferences in the field. Navigli’s research initially focused on creating semantic representations of words and expressions across multiple languages. He led the development of BabelNet (https://babelnet.org), a large multilingual semantic graph built from concepts expressed in hundreds of languages by linking and integrating entries from various resources, including WordNet, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Wikidata. BabelNet is currently used by more than one thousand universities and research institutions worldwide. For his work on BabelNet, which contributed to overcoming language barriers, he received the META (Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance) Prize 2015.
Navigli is the lead of the national Large Language Model (LLM) Minerva (https://minerva-ai.org), the first LLM pre-trained in Italian and the only public, open-source LLM project in Italy. For his work on Minerva, he received the Capo D’Orlando Prize in 2025. From 2013 to 2020, Navigli served as Associate Editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence. Between 2017 and 2023, he was a member of the ERC Starting Grant panel for Computer Science.
Navigli is also Scientific Director and co-founder of Babelscape (https://babelscape.com), a Sapienza deep-tech spin-off specializing in neuro-symbolic text understanding and generation.